I was still wearing the hospital wristband when Marlene brought the envelope to Sunday dinner.Three weeks had passed since the emergency C-section, and the plastic band kept catching the tender skin on the inside of my wrist whenever I shifted Noah against my chest. I had not taken it off. I am not sure why. Maybe because removing it felt like closing a door on something I was not ready to stop thinking about.The dining room smelled like roast beef and rosemary and the particular warm-starch smell of good potatoes, but underneath all of it was something else, something metallic and sour that I had been carrying since the afternoon a nurse in the maternity ward lowered her voice and told me, carefully, that my mother-in-law had been seen near my newborn’s bassinet with a cheek-swab kit.
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